Ideology

From Metapedia

A contested and slippery term in the variety of its ordinary and specialized uses. For our context, "ideology" does not refer to individually held "personal" beliefs, but to a set of mediated views of the world that circulate in a culture and provide self-replicating views of power and inclusion and exclusion. Operative senses of the term:

• Ideology as the world framed in discourse (Foucault) mediating the structures of power and authority to individuals. Individual subjects are said to take up social positions--identity positions, subjectivity--already formed in discourse (for example, in laws, social class language, religious language, social institutions).
• Ideology as the socially constructed sense of identity and values, functioning to obscure the real sources of power, and to reproduce/perpetuate existing power structures (by gender, race, class, nationality, etc.) (an extension of the earlier Marxist notion of ideology as "false consciousness").
• Ideology as the consciously held belief system of individual members of a social group, which may or may not reflect the underlying structures of power and authority.

From an Althusserian point of view: Ideology is one of the ways by which Althusser tries to understand and analyze how the relations of production are secured in society. Marxist theory talks about reproduction of means of production as well as the reproduction of labor-power. The latter is not only a matter of providing wages to the workers but it is also about understanding what their “historical” needs are (Althusser, 131). Moreover, it is necessary to ensure the reproduction of labor’s skills (by means of education) and, most importantly, “the reproduction of its [labor power’s] subjection to the ruling ideology” (Althusser, 133). Ideology becomes real and tangible in two ways. First of all, it is materialized in the Ideological State Apparatusses, and then it is real because it comes through the subject’s actions. The subject has ideas and beliefs which he holds as ‘truths’. He therefore acts in consistence with these ‘truths,’ exercises rituals and practices that have been established by the ideological apparatuses themselves from which these same ideas came into being to begin with.

Ideology works at its best when ideological practices are so much embedded into our consciousness that they seem “natural” or “common sense”. As a matter of fact, according to Althusser, ideology has a function of recognition and interpellation. Ideology “calls out” to individuals who recognize themselves as the ones being called. This recognition is also an acceptance of subjection because the subjects understand and accept that the hail or interpellation is directed toward them. Since we live in a society constructed around symbols and meanings, we are “always-already subjects and as such constantly practice the rituals of ideological recognition, which guarantee that we are indeed concrete, individual, distinguishable and (naturally) irreplaceable subjects” (Althusser, 176-177). Through ideological recognition we are categorized and tagged even before birth, through gender, through blood ties, through family names, etc.